Article description: (description ) This attribute controls the content of the description and og:description elements. | The Social Cancer
A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere from the Spanish of
José Rizal
By
Charles Derbyshire
Manila
Philippine Education Company
New York: World Book Company
1912
THE NOVELS OF JOSÉ RIZAL
Translated from Spanish into English
BY CHARLES DERBYSHIRE
THE SOCIAL CANCER (NOLI ME TANGERE)
THE REIGN OF GREED (EL FILIBUSTERISMO)
Copyright, 1912, by Philippine Education Company.
Entered at Stationers' Hall.
Registrado en las Islas Filipinas.
All rights reserved.
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
I
"We travel rapidly in these historical sketches. The reader
flies in his express train in a few minutes through a couple
of centuries. The centuries pass more slowly to those to
whom the years are doled out day by day. Institutions grow
and beneficently develop themselves, making their way into
the hearts of generations which are shorter-lived than they,
attracting love and respect, and winning loyal obedience;
and then as gradually forfeiting by their shortcomings
the allegiance which had been honorably gained in worthier
periods. We see wealth and greatness; we see corruption and
vice; and one seems to follow so close upon the other, that we
fancy they must have always co-existed. We look more steadily,
and we perceive long periods of time, in which there is first
a growth and then a decay, like what we perceive in a tree
of the forest."
FROUDE, _Annals of an English Abbey_.
Monasticism's record in the Philippines presents no new general fact
to the eye of history. The attempt to eliminate the eternal feminine
from her natural and normal sphere in the scheme of things there met
with the same certain and signal disaster that awaits every perversion
of human activity. Beginning with a band of zealous, earnest men,
sincere in their convictions, to whom the cause was all and their
personalities nothing, it there, as elsewhere, passed through its
usual cycle of usefulness, stagnation, corruption, and degeneration.
To the unselfish and heroic efforts of the early friars Spain
in large measure owed her dominion over the Philippine Islands
and the Filipinos a marked advance on the road to civilization and
nationality. In fact, after the dreams of sudden wealth from gold and
spices had faded, the islands were retained chiefly as a missionary
conquest and a stepping-stone to the broader fields of Asia, with
Manila as a depot for the Oriental trade. The records of those early
years are filled with tales of courage and heroism worthy of Spain's
proudest years, as the missionary fathers labored with unflagging
zeal in disinterested endeavor for the spread of the Faith and the
betterment of the condition of the Malays among whom they found
themselves. They won the confidence of the native peoples, gathered
them into settlements and villages, led them into the ways of peace,
and became their protectors, guides, and counselors.
In those times the cross and the sword went hand in hand, but in the
Philippines the latter was rarely needed or used. The lightness and
vivacity of the Spanish character, with its strain of Orientalism,
its fertility of resource in meeting new conditions, its adaptability
in dealing with the dwellers in warmer lands, all played their part in
this as in the other conquests. Only on occasions when some stubborn
resistance was met with, as in Manila and the surrounding country,
where the most advanced of the native peoples dwelt and where some of
the forms and beliefs of Islam had been established, was it necessary
to resort to violence to destroy the native leaders and replace them
with the missionary fathers. A few sallies by young Salcedo, the Cortez
of the Philippine conquest, with a company of the splendid infantry,
which was at that time the admiration and despair of martial Europe,
soon effectively exorcised any idea of resistance that even the boldest
and most intransigent of the native leaders might have entertained.
For the most part, no great persuasion was needed to turn a simple,
imaginative, fatalistic people from a few vague animistic deities
to the systematic iconology and the elaborate ritual of the Spanish
Church. An obscure _Bathala_ or a dim _Malyari_ was easily superseded
by or transformed into a clearly defined _Diós_, and in the case of
any especially tenacious "demon," he could without much difficulty
be merged into a Christian saint or devil. There was no organized
priesthood to be overcome, the primitive religious observances
consisting almost entirely of occasional orgies presided over by
an old woman, who filled the priestly offices of interpreter for
the unseen powers and chief eater at the sacrificial feast. With
their unflagging zeal, their organization, their elaborate forms
and ceremonies, the missionaries were enabled to win the confidence
of the natives, especially as the greater part of them learned the
local language and identified their lives with the communities under
their care. Accordingly, the people took kindly to their new teachers
and rulers, so that in less than a generation Spanish authority was
generally recognized in the settled portions of the Philippines,
and in the succeeding years the missionaries gradually extended this
area by forming settlements from among the wilder peoples, whom they
persuaded to abandon the more objectionable features of their old
roving, often predatory, life and to group themselves into towns and
villages "under the bell."
The tactics employed in the conquest and the subsequent behavior of
the conquerors were true to the old Spanish nature, so succinctly
characterized by a plain-spoken Englishman of Mary's reign, when the
war-cry of Castile encircled the globe and even hovered ominously
near the "sceptered isle," when in the intoxication of power character
stands out so sharply defined: "They be verye wyse and politicke, and
can, thorowe ther wysdome, reform and brydell theyr owne natures for
a tyme, and applye ther conditions to the manners of those men with
whom they meddell gladlye by friendshippe; whose mischievous maners
a man shall never know untyll he come under ther subjection; but then
shall he parfectlye parceve and fele them: for in dissimulations untyll
they have ther purposes, and afterwards in oppression and tyrannye,
when they can obtain them, they do exceed all other nations upon the
earthe." [1]
In the working out of this spirit, with all the indomitable courage
and fanatical ardor derived from the long contests with the Moors,
they reduced the native peoples to submission, but still not to the
galling yoke which they fastened upon the aborigines of America, to
make one Las Casas shine amid the horde of Pizarros. There was some
compulsory labor in timber-cutting and ship-building, with enforced
military service as rowers and soldiers for expeditions to the Moluccas
and the coasts of Asia, but nowhere the unspeakable atrocities which
in Mexico, Hispaniola, and South America drove mothers to strangle
their babes at birth and whole tribes to prefer self-immolation to the
living death in the mines and slave-pens. Quite differently from the
case in America, where entire islands and districts were depopulated,
to bring on later the curse of negro slavery, in the Philippines
the fact appears that the native population really increased and
the standard of living was raised under the stern, yet beneficent,
tutelage of the missionary fathers. The great distance and the
hardships of the journey precluded the coming of many irresponsible
adventurers from Spain and, fortunately for the native population,
no great mineral wealth was ever discovered in the Philippine Islands.
The system of government was, in its essential features, a simple
one. The missionary priests drew the inhabitants of the towns
and villages about themselves or formed new settlements, and with
profuse use of symbol and symbolism taught the people the Faith,
laying particular stress upon "the fear of God," as administered by
them, reconciling the people to their subjection by inculcating the
Christian virtues of patience and humility. When any recalcitrants
refused to accept the new order, or later showed an inclination to
break away from it, the military forces, acting usually under secret
directions from the padre, made raids in the disaffected parts with
all the unpitying atrocity the Spanish soldiery were ever capable of
displaying in their dealings with a weaker people. After sufficient
punishment had been inflicted and a wholesome fear inspired, the padre
very opportunely interfered in the natives' behalf, by which means
they were convinced that peace and security lay in submission to the
authorities, especially to the curate of their town or district. A
single example will suffice to make the method clear: not an isolated
instance but a typical case chosen from among the mass of records
left by the chief actors themselves.
Fray Domingo Perez, evidently a man of courage and conviction, for he
later lost his life in the work of which he wrote, was the Dominican
vicar on the Zambales coast when that Order temporarily took over the
district from the Recollects. In a report written for his superior in
1680 he outlines the method clearly: "In order that those whom we have
assembled in the three villages may persevere in their settlements,
the most efficacious fear and the one most suited to their nature is
that the Spaniards of the fort and presidio of Paynaven [2] of whom
they have a very great fear, may come very often to the said villages
and overrun the land, and penetrate even into their old recesses where
they formerly lived; and if perchance they should find anything planted
in the said recesses that they would destroy it and cut it down without
leaving them anything. And so that they may see the father protects
them, when the said Spaniards come to the village, the father opposes
them and takes the part of the Indians. But it is always necessary
in this matter for the soldiers to conquer, and the father is always
very careful always to inform the Spaniards by whom and where anything
is planted which it may be necessary to destroy, and that the edicts
which his Lordship, the governor, sent them be carried out .... But
at all events said Spaniards are to make no trouble for the Indians
whom they find in the villages, but rather must treat them well." [3]
This in 1680: the Dominican transcriber of the record in 1906 has
added a very illuminating note, revealing the immutability of the
system and showing that the rulers possessed in a superlative degree
the Bourbonesque trait of learning nothing and forgetting nothing:
"Even when I was a missionary to the heathens from 1882 to 1892,
I had occasion to observe the said policy, to inform the chief of
the fortress of the measures that he ought to take, and to make a
false show on the other side so that it might have no influence on
the fortress."
Thus it stands out in bold relief as a system built up and maintained
by fraud and force, bound in the course of nature to last only as
long as the deception could be carried on and the repressive force
kept up to sufficient strength. Its maintenance required that the
different sections be isolated from each other so that there could
be no growth toward a common understanding and coöperation, and its
permanence depended upon keeping the people ignorant and contented with
their lot, held under strict control by religious and political fear.
Yet it was a vast improvement over their old mode of life and their
condition was bettered as they grew up to such a system. Only with
the passing of the years and the increase of wealth and influence,
the ease and luxury invited by these, and the consequent corruption so
induced, with the insatiable longing ever for more wealth and greater
influence, did the poison of greed and grasping power enter the system
to work its insidious way into every part, slowly transforming the
beneficent institution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
into an incubus weighing upon all the activities of the people in
the nineteenth, an unyielding bar to the development of the country,
a hideous anachronism in these modern times.
It must be remembered also that Spain, in the years following her
brilliant conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, lost
strength and vigor through the corruption at home induced by the
unearned wealth that flowed into the mother country from the colonies,
and by the draining away of her best blood. Nor did her sons ever
develop that economic spirit which is the permanent foundation of
all empire, but they let the wealth of the Indies flow through their
country, principally to London and Amsterdam, there to form in more
practical hands the basis of the British and Dutch colonial empires.
The priest and the soldier were supreme, so her best sons took up
either the cross or the sword to maintain her dominion in the distant
colonies, a movement which, long continued, spelled for her a form of
national suicide. The soldier expended his strength and generally laid
down his life on alien soil, leaving no fit successor of his own stock
to carry on the work according to his standards. The priest under the
celibate system, in its better days left no offspring at all and in
the days of its corruption none bred and reared under the influences
that make for social and political progress. The dark chambers of the
Inquisition stifled all advance in thought, so the civilization and
the culture of Spain, as well as her political system, settled into
rigid forms to await only the inevitable process of stagnation and
decay. In her proudest hour an old soldier, who had lost one of his
hands fighting her battles against the Turk at Lepanto, employed the
other in writing the masterpiece of her literature, which is really
a caricature of the nation.
There is much in the career of Spain that calls to mind the dazzling
beauty of her "dark-glancing daughters," with its early bloom, its
startling--almost morbid--brilliance, and its premature decay. Rapid
and brilliant was her rise, gradual and inglorious her steady decline,
from the bright morning when the banners of Castile and Aragon were
flung triumphantly from the battlements of the Alhambra, to the short
summer, not so long gone, when at Cavite and Santiago with swift,
decisive havoc the last ragged remnants of the once world-dominating
power were blown into space and time, to hover disembodied there, a
lesson and a warning to future generations. Whatever her final place in
the records of mankind, whether as the pioneer of modern civilization
or the buccaneer of the nations or, as would seem most likely, a
goodly mixture of both, she has at least--with the exception only
of her great mother, Rome--furnished the most instructive lessons in
political pathology yet recorded, and the advice to students of world
progress to familiarize themselves with her history is even more apt
today than when it first issued from the encyclopedic mind of Macaulay
nearly a century ago. Hardly had she reached the zenith of her power
when the disintegration began, and one by one her brilliant conquests
dropped away, to leave her alone in her faded splendor, with naught but
her vaunting pride left, another "Niobe of nations." In the countries
more in contact with the trend of civilization and more susceptible
to revolutionary influences from the mother country this separation
came from within, while in the remoter parts the archaic and outgrown
system dragged along until a stronger force from without destroyed it.
Nowhere was the crystallization of form and principle more pronounced
than in religious life, which fastened upon the mother country a
deadening weight that hampered all progress, and in the colonies,
notably in the Philippines, virtually converted her government into
a hagiarchy that had its face toward the past and either could not
or would not move with the current of the times. So, when "the shot
heard round the world," the declaration of humanity's right to be and
to become, in its all-encircling sweep, reached the lands controlled
by her it was coldly received and blindly rejected by the governing
powers, and there was left only the slower, subtler, but none the
less sure, process of working its way among the people to burst in
time in rebellion and the destruction of the conservative forces that
would repress it.
In the opening years of the nineteenth century the friar orders in the
Philippines had reached the apogee of their power and usefulness. Their
influence was everywhere felt and acknowledged, while the country
still prospered under the effects of the vigorous and progressive
administrations of Anda and Vargas in the preceding century. Native
levies had fought loyally under Spanish leadership against Dutch
and British invaders, or in suppressing local revolts among their
own people, which were always due to some specific grievance, never
directed definitely against the Spanish sovereignty. The Philippines
were shut off from contact with any country but Spain, and even this
communication was restricted and carefully guarded. There was an
elaborate central government which, however, hardly touched the life
of the native peoples, who were guided and governed by the parish
priests, each town being in a way an independent entity.
Of this halcyon period, just before the process of disintegration
began, there has fortunately been left a record which may be
characterized as the most notable Spanish literary production
relating to the Philippines, being the calm, sympathetic, judicial
account of one who had spent his manhood in the work there and who,
full of years and experience, sat down to tell the story of their
life. [4] In it there are no puerile whinings, no querulous curses
that tropical Malays do not order their lives as did the people of
the Spanish village where he may have been reared, no selfish laments
of ingratitude over blessings unasked and only imperfectly understood
by the natives, no fatuous self-deception as to the real conditions,
but a patient consideration of the difficulties encountered, the good
accomplished, and the unavoidable evils incident to any human work. The
country and the people, too, are described with the charming simplicity
of the eyes that see clearly, the brain that ponders deeply, and the
heart that beats sympathetically. Through all the pages of his account
runs the quiet strain of peace and contentment, of satisfaction with
the existing order, for he had looked upon the creation and saw that
it was good. There is "neither haste, nor hate, nor anger," but the
deliberate recital of the facts warmed and illumined by the geniality
of a soul to whom age and experience had brought, not a sour cynicism,
but the mellowing influence of a ripened philosophy. He was such
an old man as may fondly be imagined walking through the streets of
Parañaque in stately benignity amid the fear and respect of the brown
people over whom he watched.
But in all his chronicle there is no suggestion of anything more to
hope for, anything beyond. Beautiful as the picture is, it is that of
a system which had reached maturity: a condition of stagnation, not
of growth. In less than a decade, the terrific convulsions in European
politics made themselves felt even in the remote Philippines, and then
began the gradual drawing away of the people from their rulers--blind
gropings and erratic wanderings at first, but nevertheless persistent
and vigorous tendencies.
The first notable influence was the admission of representatives
for the Philippines into the Spanish Cortes under the revolutionary
governments and the abolition of the trade monopoly with Mexico. The
last galleon reached Manila in 1815, and soon foreign commercial
interests were permitted, in a restricted way, to enter the
country. Then with the separation of Mexico and the other American
colonies from Spain a more marked change was brought about in that
direct communication was established with the mother country, and
the absolutism of the hagiarchy first questioned by the numbers of
Peninsular Spaniards who entered the islands to trade, some even
to settle and rear families there. These also affected the native
population in the larger centers by the spread of their ideas, which
were not always in conformity with those that for several centuries
the friars had been inculcating into their wards. Moreover, there
was a not-inconsiderable portion of the population, sprung from the
friars themselves, who were eager to adopt the customs and ideas of
the Spanish immigrants.
The suppression of many of the monasteries in Spain in 1835 caused
a large influx of the disestablished monks into the Philippines in
search for a haven, and a home, thus bringing about a conflict with
the native clergy, who were displaced from their best holdings to
provide berths for the newcomers. At the same time, the increase of
education among the native priests brought the natural demand for
more equitable treatment by the Spanish friar, so insistent that it
even broke out into open rebellion in 1843 on the part of a young
Tagalog who thought himself aggrieved in this respect.
Thus the struggle went on, with stagnation above and some growth below,
so that the governors were ever getting further away from the governed,
and for such a movement there is in the course of nature but one
inevitable result, especially when outside influences are actively at
work penetrating the social system and making for better things. Among
these influences four cumulative ones may be noted: the spread of
journalism, the introduction of steamships into the Philippines,
the return of the Jesuits, and the opening of the Suez Canal.
The printing-press entered the islands with the conquest, but its use
had been strictly confined to religious works until about the middle of
the past century, when there was a sudden awakening and within a few
years five journals were being published. In 1848 appeared the first
regular newspaper of importance, _El Diario de Manila_, and about a
decade later the principal organ of the Spanish-Filipino population,
_El Comercio_, which, with varying vicissitudes, has continued down
to the present. While rigorously censored, both politically and
religiously, and accessible to only an infinitesimal portion of the
people, they still performed the service of letting a few rays of
light into the Cimmerian intellectual gloom of the time and place.
With the coming of steam navigation communication between the
different parts of the islands was facilitated and trade encouraged,
with all that such a change meant in the way of breaking up the old
isolation and tending to a common understanding. Spanish power, too,
was for the moment more firmly established, and Moro piracy in Luzon
and the Bisayan Islands, which had been so great a drawback to the
development of the country, was forever ended.
The return of the Jesuits produced two general results tending to
dissatisfaction with the existing order. To them was assigned the
missionary field of Mindanao, which meant the displacement of the
Recollect Fathers in the missions there, and for these other berths
had to be found. Again the native clergy were the losers in that they
had to give up their best parishes in Luzon, especially around Manila
and Cavite, so the breach was further widened and the soil sown with
discontent. But more far-reaching than this immediate result was
the educational movement inaugurated by the Jesuits. The native,
already feeling the vague impulses from without and stirred by the
growing restlessness of the times, here saw a new world open before
him. A considerable portion of the native population in the larger
centers, who had shared in the economic progress of the colony, were
enabled to look beyond their daily needs and to afford their children
an opportunity for study and advancement--a condition and a need met
by the Jesuits for a time.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 communication with the
mother country became cheaper, quicker, surer, so that large numbers
of Spaniards, many of them in sympathy with the republican movements
at home, came to the Philippines in search of fortunes and generally
left half-caste families who had imbibed their ideas. Native boys
who had already felt the intoxication of such learning as the schools
of Manila afforded them began to dream of greater wonders in Spain,
now that the journey was possible for them. So began the definite
movements that led directly to the disintegration of the friar régime.
In the same year occurred the revolution in the mother country,
which had tired of the old corrupt despotism. Isabella II was driven
into exile and the country left to waver about uncertainly for several
years, passing through all the stages of government from red radicalism
to absolute conservatism, finally adjusting itself to the middle course
of constitutional monarchism. During the effervescent and ephemeral
republic there was sent to the Philippines a governor who set to work
to modify the old system and establish a government more in harmony
with modern ideas and more democratic in form. His changes were hailed
with delight by the growing class of Filipinos who were striving for
more consideration in their own country, and who, in their enthusiasm
and the intoxication of the moment, perhaps became more radical than
was safe under the conditions--surely too radical for their religious
guides watching and waiting behind the veil of the temple.
In January, 1872, an uprising occurred in the naval arsenal at Cavite,
with a Spanish non-commissioned officer as one of the leaders. From
the meager evidence now obtainable, this would seem to have been
purely a local mutiny over the service questions of pay and treatment,
but in it the friars saw their opportunity. It was blazoned forth,
with all the wild panic that was to characterize the actions of the
governing powers from that time on, as the premature outbreak of
a general insurrection under the leadership of the native clergy,
and rigorous repressive measures were demanded. Three native
priests, notable for their popularity among their own people, one an
octogenarian and the other two young canons of the Manila Cathedral,
were summarily garroted, along with the renegade Spanish officer
who had participated in the mutiny. No record of any trial of these
priests has ever been brought to light. The Archbishop, himself a
secular [5] clergyman, stoutly refused to degrade them from their
holy office, and they wore their sacerdotal robes at the execution,
which was conducted in a hurried, fearful manner. At the same time
a number of young Manilans who had taken conspicuous part in the
"liberal" demonstrations were deported to the Ladrone Islands or to
remote islands of the Philippine group itself.
This was the beginning of the end. Yet there immediately followed
the delusive calm which ever precedes the fatal outburst, lulling
those marked for destruction to a delusive security. The two decades
following were years of quiet, unobtrusive growth, during which
the Philippine Islands made the greatest economic progress in their
history. But this in itself was preparing the final catastrophe, for
if there be any fact well established in human experience it is that
with economic development the power of organized religion begins to
wane--the rise of the merchant spells the decline of the priest. A
sordid change, from masses and mysteries to sugar and shoes, this is
often said to be, but it should be noted that the epochs of greatest
economic activity have been those during which the generality of
mankind have lived fuller and freer lives, and above all that in such
eras the finest intellects and the grandest souls have been developed.
Nor does an institution that has been slowly growing for three
centuries, molding the very life and fiber of the people, disintegrate
without a violent struggle, either in its own constitution or in the
life of the people trained under it. Not only the ecclesiastical but
also the social and political system of the country was controlled by
the religious orders, often silently and secretly, but none the less
effectively. This is evident from the ceaseless conflict that went on
between the religious orders and the Spanish political administrators,
who were at every turn thwarted in their efforts to keep the government
abreast of the times.
The shock of the affair of 1872 had apparently stunned the Filipinos,
but it had at the same time brought them to the parting of the ways and
induced a vague feeling that there was something radically wrong, which
could only be righted by a closer union among themselves. They began
to consider that their interests and those of the governing powers were
not the same. In these feelings of distrust toward the friars they were
stimulated by the great numbers of immigrant Spaniards who were then
entering the country, many of whom had taken part in the republican
movements at home and who, upon the restoration of the monarchy,
no doubt thought it safer for them to be at as great a distance as
possible from the throne. The young Filipinos studying in Spain came
from different parts of the islands, and by their association there
in a foreign land were learning to forget their narrow sectionalism;
hence the way was being prepared for some concerted action. Thus,
aided and encouraged by the anti-clerical Spaniards in the mother
country, there was growing up a new generation of native leaders,
who looked toward something better than the old system.
It is with this period in the history of the country--the author's
boyhood--that the story of _Noli Me Tangere_ deals. Typical scenes and
characters are sketched from life with wonderful accuracy, and the
picture presented is that of a master-mind, who knew and loved his
subject. Terror and repression were the order of the day, with ever
a growing unrest in the higher circles, while the native population
at large seemed to be completely _cowed_--"brutalized" is the term
repeatedly used by Rizal in his political essays. Spanish writers of
the period, observing only the superficial movements,--some of which
were indeed fantastical enough, for
"they,
Who in oppression's darkness caved have dwelt,
They are not eagles, nourished with the day;
What marvel, then, at times, if they mistake their way?"
--and not heeding the currents at work below, take great delight in
ridiculing the pretensions of the young men seeking advancement,
while they indulge in coarse ribaldry over the wretched condition
of the great mass of the "Indians." The author, however, himself a
"miserable Indian," vividly depicts the unnatural conditions and
dominant characters produced under the outworn system of fraud and
force, at the same time presenting his people as living, feeling,
struggling individuals, with all the frailties of human nature and all
the possibilities of mankind, either for good or evil; incidentally
he throws into marked contrast the despicable depreciation used by
the Spanish writers in referring to the Filipinos, making clear the
application of the self-evident proposition that no ordinary human
being in the presence of superior force can very well conduct himself
as a man unless he be treated as such.
The friar orders, deluded by their transient triumph and secure in
their pride of place, became more arrogant, more domineering than
ever. In the general administration the political rulers were at every
turn thwarted, their best efforts frustrated, and if they ventured
too far their own security threatened; for in the three-cornered
wrangle which lasted throughout the whole of the Spanish domination,
the friar orders had, in addition to the strength derived from their
organization and their wealth, the Damoclean weapon of control over the
natives to hang above the heads of both governor and archbishop. The
curates in the towns, always the real rulers, became veritable despots,
so that no voice dared to raise itself against them, even in the midst
of conditions which the humblest _indio_ was beginning to feel dumbly
to be perverted and unnatural, and that, too, after three centuries
of training under the system that he had ever been taught to accept as
"the will of God."
The friars seemed long since to have forgotten those noble aims
that had meant so much to the founders and early workers of their
orders, if indeed the great majority of those of the later day had
ever realized the meaning of their office, for the Spanish writers of
the time delight in characterizing them as the meanest of the Spanish
peasantry, when not something worse, who had been "lassoed," taught a
few ritualistic prayers, and shipped to the Philippines to be placed
in isolated towns as lords and masters of the native population, with
all the power and prestige over a docile people that the sacredness of
their holy office gave them. These writers treat the matter lightly,
seeing in it rather a huge joke on the "miserable Indians," and
give the friars great credit for "patriotism," a term which in this
connection they dragged from depth to depth until it quite aptly fitted
Dr. Johnson's famous definition, "the last refuge of a scoundrel."
In their conduct the religious corporations, both as societies and as
individuals, must be estimated according to their own standards--the
application of any other criterion would be palpably unfair. They
undertook to hold the native in subjection, to regulate the essential
activities of his life according to their ideas, so upon them
must fall the responsibility for the conditions finally attained:
to destroy the freedom of the subject and then attempt to blame him
for his conduct is a paradox into which the learned men often fell,
perhaps inadvertently through their deductive logic. They endeavored
to shape the lives of their Malay wards not only in this existence
but also in the next. Their vows were poverty, chastity, and obedience.
The vow of poverty was early relegated to the limbo of neglect. Only a
few years after the founding of Manila royal decrees began to issue on
the subject of complaints received by the King over the usurpation of
lands on the part of the priests. Using the same methods so familiar in
the heyday of the institution of monasticism in Europe--pious gifts,
deathbed bequests, pilgrims' offerings--the friar orders gradually
secured the richest of the arable lands in the more thickly settled
portions of the Philippines, notably the part of Luzon occupied by
the Tagalogs. Not always, however, it must in justice be recorded,
were such doubtful means resorted to, for there were instances where
the missionary was the pioneer, gathering about himself a band of
devoted natives and plunging into the unsettled parts to build up
a town with its fields around it, which would later become a friar
estate. With the accumulated incomes from these estates and the fees
for religious observances that poured into their treasuries, the
orders in their nature of perpetual corporations became the masters of
the situation, the lords of the country. But this condition was not
altogether objectionable; it was in the excess of their greed that
they went astray, for the native peoples had been living under this
system through generations and not until they began to feel that they
were not receiving fair treatment did they question the authority of
a power which not only secured them a peaceful existence in this life
but also assured them eternal felicity in the next.
With only the shining exceptions that are produced in any system, no
matter how false its premises or how decadent it may become, to uphold
faith in the intrinsic soundness of human nature, the vow of chastity
was never much more than a myth. Through the tremendous influence
exerted over a fanatically religious people, who implicitly followed
the teachings of the reverend fathers, once their confidence had
been secured, the curate was seldom to be gainsaid in his desires. By
means of the secret influence in the confessional and the more open
political power wielded by him, the fairest was his to command,
and the favored one and her people looked upon the choice more as an
honor than otherwise, for besides the social standing that it gave her
there was the proud prospect of becoming the mother of children who
could claim kinship with the dominant race. The curate's "companion"
or the sacristan's wife was a power in the community, her family was
raised to a place of importance and influence among their own people,
while she and her ecclesiastical offspring were well cared for. On
the death or removal of the curate, it was almost invariably found
that she had been provided with a husband or protector and a not
inconsiderable amount of property--an arrangement rather appealing
to a people among whom the means of living have ever been so insecure.
That this practise was not particularly offensive to the people among
whom they dwelt may explain the situation, but to claim that it excuses
the friars approaches dangerously close to casuistry. Still, as long as
this arrangement was decently and moderately carried out, there seems
to have been no great objection, nor from a worldly point of view,
with all the conditions considered, could there be much. But the old
story of excess, of unbridled power turned toward bad ends, again
recurs, at the same time that the ideas brought in by the Spaniards
who came each year in increasing numbers and the principles observed
by the young men studying in Europe cast doubt upon the fitness of
such a state of affairs. As they approached their downfall, like all
mankind, the friars became more open, more insolent, more shameless,
in their conduct.
The story of Maria Clara, as told in _Noli Me Tangere_, is by no means
an exaggerated instance, but rather one of the few clean enough to
bear the light, and her fate, as depicted in the epilogue, is said
to be based upon an actual occurrence with which the author must have
been familiar.
The vow of obedience--whether considered as to the Pope, their
highest religious authority, or to the King of Spain, their political
liege--might not always be so callously disregarded, but it could be
evaded and defied. From the Vatican came bull after bull, from the
Escorial decree after decree, only to be archived in Manila, sometimes
after a hollow pretense of compliance. A large part of the records of
Spanish domination is taken up with the wearisome quarrels that went
on between the Archbishop, representing the head of the Church, and
the friar orders, over the questions of the episcopal visitation and
the enforcement of the provisions of the Council of Trent relegating
the monks to their original status of missionaries, with the friars
invariably victorious in their contentions. Royal decrees ordering
inquiries into the titles to the estates of the men of poverty and
those providing for the education of the natives in Spanish were
merely sneered at and left to molder in harmless quiet. Not without
good grounds for his contention, the friar claimed that the Spanish
dominion over the Philippines depended upon him, and he therefore
confidently set himself up as the best judge of how that dominion
should be maintained.
Thus there are presented in the Philippines of the closing quarter of
the century just past the phenomena so frequently met with in modern
societies, so disheartening to the people who must drag out their lives
under them, of an old system which has outworn its usefulness and is
being called into question, with forces actively at work disintegrating
it, yet with the unhappy folk bred and reared under it unprepared for
a new order of things. The old faith was breaking down, its forms
and beliefs, once so full of life and meaning, were being sharply
examined, doubt and suspicion were the order of the day. Moreover,
it must ever be borne in mind that in the Philippines this unrest,
except in the parts where the friars were the landlords, was not
general among the people, the masses of whom were still sunk in their
"loved Egyptian night," but affected only a very small proportion of
the population--for the most part young men who were groping their
way toward something better, yet without any very clearly conceived
idea of what that better might be, and among whom was to be found the
usual sprinkling of "sunshine patriots" and omnipresent opportunists
ready for any kind of trouble that will afford them a chance to rise.
Add to the apathy of the masses dragging out their vacant lives amid
the shadows of religious superstition and to the unrest of the few,
the fact that the orders were in absolute control of the political
machinery of the country, with the best part of the agrarian wealth
amortized in their hands; add also the ever-present jealousies, petty
feuds, and racial hatreds, for which Manila and the Philippines,
with their medley of creeds and races, offer such a fertile field,
all fostered by the governing class for the maintenance of the old
Machiavelian principle of "divide and rule," and the sum is about
the most miserable condition under which any portion of mankind ever
tried to fulfill nature's inexorable laws of growth.
II
And third came she who gives dark creeds their power,
Silabbat-paramasa, sorceress,
Draped fair in many lands as lowly Faith,
But ever juggling souls with rites and prayers;
The keeper of those keys which lock up Hells
And open Heavens. "Wilt thou dare," she said,
"Put by our sacred books, dethrone our gods,
Unpeople all the temples, shaking down
That law which feeds the priests and props the realm?"
But Buddha answered, "What thou bidd'st me keep
Is form which passes, but the free Truth stands;
Get thee unto thy darkness."
SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, _The Light of Asia_.
"Ah, simple people, how little do you know the blessing that you
enjoy! Neither hunger, nor nakedness, nor inclemency of the weather
troubles you. With the payment of seven reals per year, you remain free
of contributions. You do not have to close your houses with bolts. You
do not fear that the district troopers will come in to lay waste your
fields, and trample you under foot at your own firesides. You call
'father' the one who is in command over you. Perhaps there will come
a time when you will be more civilized, and you will break out in
revolution; and you will wake terrified, at the tumult of the riots,
and will see blood flowing through these quiet fields, and gallows
and guillotines erected in these squares, which never yet have seen an
execution." [6] Thus moralized a Spanish traveler in 1842, just as that
_dolce far niente_ was drawing to its close. Already far-seeing men had
begun to raise in the Spanish parliament the question of the future of
the Philippines, looking toward some definite program for their care
under modern conditions and for the adjustment of their relations with
the mother country. But these were mere Cassandra-voices--the horologe
of time was striking for Rome's successor, as it did for Rome herself.
Just where will come the outbreak after three centuries of
mind-repression and soul-distortion, of forcing a growing subject
into the strait-jacket of medieval thought and action, of natural
selection reversed by the constant elimination of native initiative and
leadership, is indeed a curious study. That there will be an outbreak
somewhere is as certain as that the plant will grow toward the light,
even under the most unfavorable conditions, for man's nature is but
the resultant of eternal forces that ceaselessly and irresistibly
interplay about and upon him, and somewhere this resultant will
express itself in thought or deed.
After three centuries of Spanish ecclesiastical domination in the
Philippines, it was to be expected that the wards would turn against
their mentors the methods that had been used upon them, nor is it
especially remarkable that there was a decided tendency in some parts
to revert to primitive barbarism, but that concurrently a creative
genius--a bard or seer--should have been developed among a people
who, as a whole, have hardly passed through the clan or village
stage of society, can be regarded as little less than a psychological
phenomenon, and provokes the perhaps presumptuous inquiry as to whether
there may not be some things about our common human nature that the
learned doctors have not yet included in their anthropometric diagrams.
On the western shore of the Lake of Bay in the heart of the Philippines
clusters the village of Kalamba, first established by the Jesuit
Fathers in the early days of the conquest, and upon their expulsion
in 1767 taken over by the Crown, which later transferred it to the
Dominicans, under whose care the fertile fields about it became one
of the richest of the friar estates. It can hardly be called a town,
even for the Philippines, but is rather a market-village, set as it
is at the outlet of the rich country of northern Batangas on the
open waterway to Manila and the outside world. Around it flourish
the green rice-fields, while Mount Makiling towers majestically near
in her moods of cloud and sunshine, overlooking the picturesque
curve of the shore and the rippling waters of the lake. Shadowy
to the eastward gleam the purple crests of Banahao and Cristobal,
and but a few miles to the southwestward dim-thundering, seething,
earth-rocking Taal mutters and moans of the world's birth-throes. It
is the center of a region rich in native lore and legend, as it sleeps
through the dusty noons when the cacao leaves droop with the heat and
dreams through the silvery nights, waking twice or thrice a week to
the endless babble and ceaseless chatter of an Oriental market where
the noisy throngs make of their trading as much a matter of pleasure
and recreation as of business.
Directly opposite this market-place, in a house facing the village
church, there was born in 1861 into the already large family of one
of the more prosperous tenants on the Dominican estate a boy who was
to combine in his person the finest traits of the Oriental character
with the best that Spanish and European culture could add, on whom
would fall the burden of his people's woes to lead him over the _via
dolorosa_ of struggle and sacrifice, ending in his own destruction
amid the crumbling ruins of the system whose disintegration he himself
had done so much to compass.
José Rizal-Mercado y Alonso, as his name emerges from the confusion
of Filipino nomenclature, was of Malay extraction, with some distant
strains of Spanish and Chinese blood. His genealogy reveals several
persons remarkable for intellect and independence of character, notably
a Philippine Eloise and Abelard, who, drawn together by their common
enthusiasm for study and learning, became his maternal grandparents, as
well as a great-uncle who was a traveler and student and who directed
the boy's early studies. Thus from the beginning his training was
exceptional, while his mind was stirred by the trouble already brewing
in his community, and from the earliest hours of consciousness he saw
about him the wrongs and injustices which overgrown power will ever
develop in dealing with a weaker subject. One fact of his childhood,
too, stands out clearly, well worthy of record: his mother seems to
have been a woman of more than ordinary education for the time and
place, and, pleased with the boy's quick intelligence, she taught him
to read Spanish from a copy of the Vulgate in that language, which
she had somehow managed to secure and keep in her possession--the
old, old story of the Woman and the Book, repeated often enough under
strange circumstances, but under none stranger than these. The boy's
father was well-to-do, so he was sent at the age of eight to study
in the new Jesuit school in Manila, not however before he had already
inspired some awe in his simple neighbors by the facility with which
he composed verses in his native tongue.
He began his studies in a private house while waiting for an
opportunity to enter the Ateneo, as the Jesuit school is called,
and while there he saw one of his tutors, Padre Burgos, haled to
an ignominious death on the garrote as a result of the affair of
1872. This made a deep impression on his childish mind and, in fact,
seems to have been one of the principal factors in molding his ideas
and shaping his career. That the effect upon him was lasting and that
his later judgment confirmed him in the belief that a great injustice
had been done, are shown by the fact that his second important work,
_El Filibusterismo_, written about 1891, and miscalled by himself a
"novel," for it is really a series of word-paintings constituting a
terrific arraignment of the whole régime, was dedicated to the three
priests executed in 1872, in these words: "Religion, in refusing
to degrade you, has placed in doubt the crime imputed to you; the
government, in surrounding your case with mystery and shadow, gives
reason for belief in some error, committed in fatal moments; and all
the Philippines, in venerating your memory and calling you martyrs,
in no way acknowledges your guilt." The only answer he ever received
to this was eight Remington bullets fired into his back.
In the Ateneo he quickly attracted attention and became a general
favorite by his application to his studies, the poetic fervor with
which he entered into all the exercises of religious devotion, and
the gentleness of his character. He was from the first considered
"peculiar," for so the common mind regards everything that fails to fit
the old formulas, being of a rather dreamy and reticent disposition,
more inclined to reading Spanish romances than joining in the games of
his schoolmates. And of all the literatures that could be placed in
the hands of an imaginative child, what one would be more productive
in a receptive mind of a fervid love of life and home and country and
all that men hold dear, than that of the musical language of Castile,
with its high coloring and passionate character?
His activities were varied, for, in addition to his regular studies,
he demonstrated considerable skill in wood-carving and wax-modeling,
and during this period won several prizes for poetical compositions
in Spanish, which, while sometimes juvenile in form and following
closely after Spanish models, reveal at times flashes of thought and
turns of expression that show distinct originality; even in these
early compositions there is that plaintive undertone, that minor
chord of sadness, which pervades all his poems, reaching its fullest
measure of pathos in the verses written in his death-cell. He received
a bachelor's degree according to the Spanish system in 1877, but
continued advanced studies in agriculture at the Ateneo, at the same
time that he was pursuing the course in philosophy in the Dominican
University of Santo Tomas, where in 1879 he startled the learned
doctors by a reference in a prize poem to the Philippines as his
"patria," fatherland. This political heresy on the part of a native
of the islands was given no very serious attention at the time, being
looked upon as the vagary of a schoolboy, but again in the following
year, by what seems a strange fatality, he stirred the resentment of
the friars, especially the Dominicans, by winning over some of their
number the first prize in a literary contest celebrated in honor of
the author of _Don Quixote_.
The archaic instruction in Santo Tomas soon disgusted him and led to
disagreements with the instructors, and he turned to Spain. Plans
for his journey and his stay there had to be made with the utmost
caution, for it would hardly have fared well with his family had
it become known that the son of a tenant on an estate which was a
part of the University endowment was studying in Europe. He reached
Spanish territory first in Barcelona, the hotbed of radicalism,
where he heard a good deal of revolutionary talk, which, however,
seems to have made but little impression upon him, for throughout
his entire career breadth of thought and strength of character are
revealed in his consistent opposition to all forms of violence.
In Madrid he pursued the courses in medicine and philosophy, but a
fact of even more consequence than his proficiency in his regular
work was his persistent study of languages and his omnivorous
reading. He was associated with the other Filipinos who were working
in a somewhat spectacular way, misdirected rather than led by what
may be styled the Spanish liberals, for more considerate treatment of
the Philippines. But while he was among them he was not of them, as
his studious habits and reticent disposition would hardly have made
him a favorite among those who were enjoying the broader and gayer
life there. Moreover, he soon advanced far beyond them in thought by
realizing that they were beginning at the wrong end of the labor,
for even at that time he seems to have caught, by what must almost
be looked upon as an inspiration of genius, since there was nothing
apparent in his training that would have suggested it, the realization
of the fact that hope for his people lay in bettering their condition,
that any real benefit must begin with the benighted folk at home,
that the introduction of reforms for which they were unprepared would
be useless, even dangerous to them. This was not at all the popular
idea among his associates and led to serious disagreements with their
leaders, for it was the way of toil and sacrifice without any of the
excitement and glamour that came from drawing up magnificent plans
and sending them back home with appeals for funds to carry on the
propaganda--for the most part banquets and entertainments to Spain's
political leaders.
His views, as revealed in his purely political writings, may be
succinctly stated, for he had that faculty of expression which never
leaves any room for doubt as to the meaning. His people had a natural
right to grow and to develop, and any obstacles to such growth and
development were to be removed. He realized that the masses of his
countrymen were sunk deep in poverty and ignorance, cringing and
crouching before political authority, crawling and groveling before
religious superstition, but to him this was no subject for jest
or indifferent neglect--it was a serious condition which should be
ameliorated, and hope lay in working into the inert social mass the
leaven of conscious individual effort toward the development of a
distinctive, responsible personality. He was profoundly appreciative
of all the good that Spain had done, but saw in this no inconsistency
with the desire that this gratitude might be given cause to be ever
on the increase, thereby uniting the Philippines with the mother
country by the firm bonds of common ideas and interests, for his
earlier writings breathe nothing but admiration, respect, and loyalty
for Spain and her more advanced institutions. The issue was clear to
him and he tried to keep it so.
It was indeed administrative myopia, induced largely by blind greed,
which allowed the friar orders to confuse the objections to their
repressive system with an attack upon Spanish sovereignty, thereby
dragging matters from bad to worse, to engender ill feeling and finally
desperation. This narrow, selfish policy had about as much soundness
in it as the idea upon which it was based, so often brought forward
with what looks very suspiciously like a specious effort to cover
mental indolence with a glittering generality, "that the Filipino is
only a grown-up child and needs a strong paternal government," an idea
which entirely overlooks the natural fact that when an impressionable
subject comes within the influence of a stronger force from a higher
civilization he is very likely to remain a child--perhaps a stunted
one--as long as he is treated as such. There is about as much sense
and justice in such logic as there would be in that of keeping a babe
confined in swaddling-bands and then blaming it for not knowing how to
walk. No creature will remain a healthy child forever, but, as Spain
learned to her bitter cost, will be very prone, as the parent grows
decrepit and it begins to feel its strength, to prove a troublesome
subject to handle, thereby reversing the natural law suggested by the
comparison, and bringing such Sancho-Panza statecraft to flounder at
last through as hopeless confusion to as absurd a conclusion as his
own island government.
Rizal was not one of those rabid, self-seeking revolutionists who
would merely overthrow the government and maintain the old system
with themselves in the privileged places of the former rulers, nor
is he to be classed among the misguided enthusiasts who by their
intemperate demands and immoderate conduct merely strengthen the
hands of those in power. He realized fully that the restrictions
under which the people had become accustomed to order their lives
should be removed gradually as they advanced under suitable guidance
and became capable of adjusting themselves to the new and better
conditions. They should take all the good offered, from any source,
especially that suited to their nature, which they could properly
assimilate. No great patience was ever exhibited by him toward those
of his countrymen--the most repulsive characters in his stories are
such--who would make of themselves mere apes and mimes, decorating
themselves with a veneer of questionable alien characteristics, but
with no personality or stability of their own, presenting at best
a spectacle to make devils laugh and angels weep, lacking even the
hothouse product's virtue of being good to look upon.
Reduced to a definite form, the wish of the more thoughtful in the
new generation of Filipino leaders that was growing up was that the
Philippine Islands be made a province of Spain with representation in
the Cortes and the concomitant freedom of expression and criticism. All
that was directly asked was some substantial participation in the
management of local affairs, and the curtailment of the arbitrary power
of petty officials, especially of the friar curates, who constituted
the chief obstacle to the education and development of the people.
The friar orders were, however, all-powerful, not only in the
Philippines, but also in Madrid, where they were not chary of making
use of a part of their wealth to maintain their influence. The
efforts of the Filipinos in Spain, while closely watched, do not
seem to have been given any very serious attention, for the Spanish
authorities no doubt realized that as long as the young men stayed
in Madrid writing manifestoes in a language which less than one
per cent of their countrymen could read and spending their money
on members of the Cortes, there could be little danger of trouble
in the Philippines. Moreover, the Spanish ministers themselves
appear to have been in sympathy with the more moderate wishes of
the Filipinos, a fact indicated by the number of changes ordered
from time to time in the Philippine administration, but they were
powerless before the strength and local influence of the religious
orders. So matters dragged their weary way along until there was an
unexpected and startling development, a David-Goliath contest, and
certainly no one but a genius could have polished the "smooth stone"
that was to smite the giant.
It is said that the idea of writing a novel depicting conditions in
his native land first came to Rizal from a perusal of Eugene Sue's
_The Wandering Jew_, while he was a student in Madrid, although the
model for the greater part of it is plainly the delectable sketches
in _Don Quixote_, for the author himself possessed in a remarkable
degree that Cervantic touch which raises the commonplace, even the
mean, into the highest regions of art. Not, however, until he had
spent some time in Paris continuing his medical studies, and later in
Germany, did anything definite result. But in 1887 _Noli Me Tangere_
was printed in Berlin, in an establishment where the author is said
to have worked part of his time as a compositor in order to defray
his expenses while he continued his studies. A limited edition was
published through the financial aid extended by a Filipino associate,
and sent to Hongkong, thence to be surreptitiously introduced into
the Philippines.
_Noli Me Tangere_ ("Touch Me Not") at the time the work was written had
a peculiar fitness as a title. Not only was there an apt suggestion
of a comparison with the common flower of that name, but the term
is also applied in pathology to a malignant cancer which affects
every bone and tissue in the body, and that this latter was in the
author's mind would appear from the dedication and from the summing-up
of the Philippine situation in the final conversation between Ibarra
and Elias. But in a letter written to a friend in Paris at the time,
the author himself says that it was taken from the Gospel scene where
the risen Savior appears to the Magdalene, to whom He addresses these
words, a scene that has been the subject of several notable paintings.
In this connection it is interesting to note what he himself thought of
the work, and his frank statement of what he had tried to accomplish,
made just as he was publishing it: "_Noli Me Tangere_, an expression
taken from the Gospel of St. Luke, [7] means _touch me not_. The
book contains things of which no one up to the present time has
spoken, for they are so sensitive that they have never suffered
themselves to be touched by any one whomsoever. For my own part, I
have attempted to do what no one else has been willing to do: |